Mac OS X 10.6.5 Notes: exFAT Support, AirPrint, Flash Player Vulnerability Fixes

[fabsgwu]

10.6.5 killed my 12-Core Mac Pro... Restart>Grey Screen with Apple Logo> Black Screen and that's all folks. Pushing Opt-Command-Escape brings a blue screen and then the black screen of hell.
I tried installing into a second hard drive with 10.6.4 and it killed it too!!!! I am so pissed off right now. Quality control has gone to hell!
Luckily I have 2 more drives with 10.6.4 in them and was able to restart but with old data.
I am trying a time machine copy of System and Library and hopefully it will resuscitate it.
If not, back to a clean installation from the DVD and 10.6.4
My iPhone 4's proximity sensor is still bad after 4.1, iPhoto 11 erased people's libraries, Mac Book Airs are messed up from factory and Apple just approved a swap for my 1-month-old new Mac Pro 12-Core which crashes constantly...
What is Apple doing??? This feels like the 90's all over again... Problem after problem. I just hope they never bring the Type 11 Error again!

Did you try resetting your PRAM?
http://www.ehow.com/how_2269385_zap-pram-mac.html

 

[shartypants]

its crazy how long after GM it is taking iOS 4.2

 

[Peter Harrison]

They also added the iOS-like scrolling.

Do you mean that a page or menu continues to scroll a little bit after you've stopped? Like, you can flick it and it keeps going a bit longer? Because Snow Leopard has done that for a while. Maybe you missed a previous update.

 

[wismann]

Note that the basic AirPrint functionality, including direct printing to compatible HP printers, is included in Mac OS X 10.6.5.

What exactly does that mean? How is OS X involved in <<direct>> printing to (networked) HP printers? What's left if printing to shared printers has been removed?

Related question:
Will I be able to print only with an iPad an an HP printer? I'm going to suggest this to someone without ANY computer hardware, so there won't be wireless infrastructure. Any chance connecting printer and iPad ad-hoc or using the printer as an access point?

 

[stottmj]

In reference to TRIM support in Mac OS X...

I'll do a quick summary. SSD's slow down over time because the OS never tells it what is actually deleted and what is used overtime. As the drive slowly fills up (even if you erase files), the SSD has to request and search for empty spaces it can write to. TRIM is a new defined function on SSD's that when the OS deletes something, it tells the SSD directly that sector x-y can be written to, thus making write operations a thousand times faster since the SSD no longer fills up with files that have been deleted a long time ago.

Newer SSD drives that use the Sandforce controller no longer require TRIM support in the operating system. The internal disk controller takes care of wear leveling. From http://macsales.com/ in regards to their Mercury Extreme Pro SSD drives -- "SandForce DuraClass™ technology with Ultra-efficient Block Management & Wear Leveling offers highest endurance, performance, and power efficiency in a SATA SSD. Unlike most SSDs on the market today, the Mercury Pro family uses advanced DuraWrite™ wear-leveling and block management technologies to keep Read/Write performance at peak while others see performance fall".

 

[stottmj]

In "Other News" you can actually get 3rd party Blu-Ray drives in a Mac!
You just need Roxio Toast to burn Blu-Ray discs.

 

[manu chao]

They also added the iOS-like scrolling.

That was added already earlier this year (probably 10.6.4).

 

[skeep5]

exFAT is amazing news.

*FINALLY* we have a filesystem we can put on external hard drives and be able to share them between Macs and Windows boxes without limitations.

FAT32 had a 4GB file size limit. NTFS-3G, while available for Mac, is rather slow for writing (10-15Mbyte/sec whereas on the same hardware with HFS+ you get 30). HFS+ support is only available on Windows as a commercial (paid) add-on.

It'll be nice, when visiting friends, to just be able to hand them an exFAT formatted external USB drive and have them be able to read and write to it without having to install drivers or incur any performance penalties.

This is a lot bigger than just being able to use SDXC, folks. Time to start formatting those external hard drives with exFAT instead of HFS+.

EDIT: This will also be awesome for sharing data between OS X and Windows on a boot camped system. Just put your videos, music, etc. on an ExFAT partition and off you go.

good info thanks

 

[slicecom]

Wirelessly posted (Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU iPhone OS 4_1 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/532.9 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/4.0.5 Mobile/8B117 Safari/6531.22.7)



Exfat is missing technologies that time machine needs to operate. In other words, file and folder hard linking. It would require a complete redesign for it to work.

Cool, thanks for the info!

 

[ghostface147]

Can someone please explain why I am still able to use AirPrint with the final 10.6.5 release? I am running 4.2 GM seed on my iPhone and I am able to print to both of my printers shared via OS X. Is this because I previously had the 10.6.5 betas installed?

Yes it's because you previously had the beta builds.

 

[Mr. Retrofire]

10.6.5 killed my 12-Core Mac Pro...

I assume he did eat your mouse too.

Quality control has gone to hell!

Yeah, on your side, because you used the fake combo updater.

 

[Amdahl]

Your friends with G4 or G5 systems will look at you like you're being cruel and mean for taunting them with something (exFAT) they will never be able to enjoy.

Tuxera makes their NTFS driver for PPC Mac. They make a lot of exFat drivers. If they extend exFAT support to Mac, then the PPC crowd might also benefit.

 

[milo]

How about Trim? I really hope they got trim in this one. I know people say that SSD's don't slow down on Macs, but I beg to differ. They take longer but eventually slow down like a pc.

Good question, but I'm not getting my hopes up. The lack of trim or something like it is a huge omission for OSX, especially since apple is pushing SSD so much now. Sure, there are a few drives that don't require it, but that really limits the options for mac users.

Any rumors about potential Trim support at some point?

10.6.5 killed my 12-Core Mac Pro...

You used the official install and not the bogus "combo" link that was posted yesterday?

 

[goobot]

(and Windows 7 mobile I would imagine).

No

 

[goobot]

What exactly does that mean? How is OS X involved in <<direct>> printing to (networked) HP printers? What's left if printing to shared printers has been removed?

Related question:
Will I be able to print only with an iPad an an HP printer? I'm going to suggest this to someone without ANY computer hardware, so there won't be wireless infrastructure. Any chance connecting printer and iPad ad-hoc or using the printer as an access point?

Only new hp driverless printers work with airprint now. If it had a driver it needed to go threw your computers one.

 

[aloshka]

I really wish people would stop saying this. My iPhone streams Netflix, my PS3 streams Netflix, my Wii streams Netflix; Silverlight has plug-ins for OS X and Windows (and Windows 7 mobile I would imagine).

In any event, the issue is not that Flash is made by Adobe and that they suck (though it is true) or that Silverlight is made by Microsoft and they suck (they kind of do, but Silverlight is actually reasonably good). The issue is that they are third party plug-ins for a fixed number of platforms. By its very nature the web is most valuable to users when it is ubiquitous. With the explosion of mobile computing, it is not reasonable that any company (Adobe, Microsoft, or Apple) is going to successfully and stably port a plug-in that has to support so many browsers, browser versions, operating systems, operating system versions, form factors, hardware limitations and optimizations, etc.

Apple adding yet another third party plug in to the crap pile is just a bigger crap pile no matter how good it might be. If you're doing something on the web, then do it with the web standards and let each device/system/browser proprietor deal with making its product conform to it rather than the other way around.

So true!! I was just stating that Silverlight isn't a failure, it's used in a lot of places. But I agree on that there is just too many of them.

 

[aloshka]

In reference to TRIM support in Mac OS X...


Newer SSD drives that use the Sandforce controller no longer require TRIM support in the operating system. The internal disk controller takes care of wear leveling. From http://macsales.com/ in regards to their Mercury Extreme Pro SSD drives -- "SandForce DuraClass™ technology with Ultra-efficient Block Management & Wear Leveling offers highest endurance, performance, and power efficiency in a SATA SSD. Unlike most SSDs on the market today, the Mercury Pro family uses advanced DuraWrite™ wear-leveling and block management technologies to keep Read/Write performance at peak while others see performance fall".

I saw that, but if it's SOO not needed, why does it still support it?? (See specifications for both the mercury extreme drive as well as the sandforce controller specs)

 

[aloshka]

No

Actually I'm a developer for winmo 7, and the entire interface is silverlight. All apps are written silverlight, except games..

 

[dakwar]

I am also ecstatic about the exFAT support. But I can't stop thinking about XFS. Anyone know what the latest news on XFS is?

Edit: I mean ZFS, of course.

 

[vampyren]

I like this forum i learn 2 new things by reading this thread.
About the new exFAT and TRIM. Thanks for the info guys.

Also i wanted to say ever since i upgraded to 10.6.5 it feels like my battery lasts longer. I still use Firefox with 10-15 tabs.

Got to test the exFat tomorrow on my USB sticks. It sucked before that i could only use some only on my MBP. This is the best news in my opinion.

 

[apolloa]

I think Apple should patch Safari first before the supposed Flash holes they would have us believe...... They should repair there own products, sort there own house out before slating others.....

I have had nothing but endless problems with Flash on my new computer, I am not happy and the only way I can get it to work is to use 10.0, maybe I could totally wipe my machine in the hope it may fix it!!!... I've tried EVERYTHING else.

 

[AidenShaw]

I saw that, but if it's SOO not needed, why does it still support it?? (See specifications for both the mercury extreme drive as well as the sandforce controller specs)

It still supports it because letting the OS tell the drive which sectors are free (via TRIM) is a lot better than trying to let the drive guess which are free.

Note that some drives which claim "TRIM not needed" actually look at the NTFS allocation bitmap to find unused sectors. Not only is this a "bad idea" of the highest magnitude - obviously it won't work on an Apple HFS drive.

 

[RRmalvado]

This is great news! I'll be converting my external to exFAT tonight.

 

[RalfTheDog]

I don't know if this is true, but rumor has it, you can use PGP Whole Disk Encryption with 10.6.5 if you upgrade to 10.6.5 first, then encrypt your drive.

 

[Animacnut]

I realize that flash mobile/lite for cell phones is an independent player from regular flash player. But if there were that many bugs in the regular flash player to plug, it begs the question how solid is Flash mobile?